Introspection: Examining my motives

“Am I interested in making change to impact and improve lives? Or am I interested in being the one known for making change to impact and improve lives?” Each week I find myself asking these introspective questions to check my motives. 
“Is my desire for earning credit for all the things I do, think, propose, create, grander than my desire to see things work, improve, and change?” My mind and spirit are constantly battling with these questions. Am I doing this for people to look at the stars? Or for people to focus on my finger pointing to the stars?

I must say, God knows how he uses seasons, circumstances, jobs, opportunities to shape who He wants us to become, to polish the rough edges in our character. The current position in which I am in life is one of service, team-work and self-effacement to elevate others, and to achieve bigger causes. It’s a position in which one can easily get lost in the power they have to impact and improve the lives of some, and rather use and abuse others. It’s a position that can easily corrupt the heart, because the life-transformation of many is sometimes attached to your judgement. Yet, I believe, when God puts us in such positions of responsible leadership, it is to mold our hearts and to make us better persons, more just in our ways. I thank God for reminding me each week, to question my motives before I do (or don’t do) something. He presents a mirror before our life that helps us look at ourselves in the eyes, to be truthful with ourselves. And when we allow Him to act, His Holy Spirit convicts our hearts when we err on the side of selfishness or self-centered aggrandizement – scripture says “All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight, But the LORD weighs the motives” (Prov.16:2) and further on it says in James 4:3 “You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.” This reminds me of something my dad always told me: In the 1990s, he recalls, his prayer was always for God to give him his daily bread, so that he may share with his employees, and that his children would be satisfied with the crumbs. During that decade, and with the backdrop of the 1994 devaluation financial crisis in Cameroon, his construction company exponentially grew, recruited hundreds of people, expanded out of Cameroon, and his children did not lack. He always credits that expansion to God, giving him enough to give others.

As I reflect on life and on the word, I realize that our motives probably have a role in maintaining us sometimes in some unhealthy pattern of mental, emotional & financial slavery because we have not learned the grander lessons God wants us to gain from that test in our life, to pass to the next class. It’s amazing how God speaks to us; when we chose to simply listen to Him vs ask for things. In those moments, when the voice of God is so clear, all else takes second place. In that moment, I know who I am. I know whose I am. I know who is my Lord, I know who is my Judge. I live with the peace that God, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jer. 29:11) , and I find hope because, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Rom. 8:28)

The more I seek an intimate relationship with God and the more I delve into the Gospel, the more I understand why it is called the Goooooood News!!!